Road to Unity — Part 4

One day a great European war will come out of some damn foolish thing out of the Balkans. Otto von Bismarck, 1888 The Spirit of 1914 Sunday the 28th of June 1914 was a beautiful summer day. Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro Hungarian Empire, and his wife Sophie have been invited to inspect troop manoeuvres in the capital of newly acquired Bosnia in Sarajevo. The 28th was a special day for Serbs as it was Vidov Dande, a national and religious holiday for the Empire's Serbian population.

The visit of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie was seen as a outstretched hand by the Habsburg royal family, by the Austria Hungarian state to the Serb population and to demonstrate the benign nature of Austrian overlordship, the commitment of Austria to the development, prosperity and betterment of Bosnia, which had only been acquired by the Austro Hungarian Empire from the Ottoman Empire in 1911. It was also a very significant day for Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia, because it was their 14th wedding anniversary.

They had a very interesting relationship. As the heir to the throne of one of Europe's great empires, Franz Ferdinand had been expected to marry someone of the same status, of the same position. He was expected to marry a Romanov or a Hohenzollern, or a member of the British royal family. Instead, by marrying Sophia, he'd married someone who was several ranks below him in the aristocratic pecking order. This had caused a tremendous controversy in aristocratic circles.

The heir to the throne of Austria marrying for love. How strange, how quaint. Almost Needless to say, the Emperor of Austria at the time, Franz Joseph, had viewed this very dimly. But to get around this, Franz Ferdinand had agreed to a morgomatic marriage. A morgomatic marriage is a marriage between unequals. It is a marriage that acknowledges that Sofia will not hold the rank of Empress and that their children will not accede to the Austro Hungarian throne.

She was banned from many public occasions and she was not even allowed to sit next to him in public, but as he was being invited in his capacity as a representative of the Austrian Armed Forces, the Kuk, the Kaiser Glicked and Kuniglicht, the Imperial and Royal Army of Austria Hungary. This allowed them to enjoy being in public together. However, the trip to Sarajevo would very quickly turn sour. Whilst driving in an open top car, a 19 year old Serb radical threw a hand grenade at the couple.

Seeing the hand grenade coming, the driver had accelerated and the grenade landed instead underneath the next car, injuring 16 people. Arriving at the town hall, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were shaken, disturbed, maybe even a little bit flustered. But after a few awkward formalities, they insisted upon driving to the hospital to visit those wounded in the attack. Security was on high alert. People didn't know if there would be another terrorist attack, but duty had its obligations and so off they went. The driver, not being familiar with the streets of Sarajevo, took a turn down a one way road and he ended up parked, looking desperately for the reverse gear immediately in front of a young man called Gavrillo Princip.

Not believing his luck, Princip, a young Serb radical, fired with hatred at the supposed oppression of the Habsburg Empire that prevented his dream of the creation of a single united Yugoslav state under Serb leadership, drew his pistol, approached the car and fired two shots. He hit Franz Ferdinand in the neck, who still managed to let out a cry of Sophie. Don't die, live for our children. Sophie was hit in the stomach and they were both dead within the hour.

Europe in the summer of 1914 was a tinderbox. Imperial rivalry had driven the great powers, Austria, Germany, France, Russia and Britain to a point of heightened tension, and at any moment a spark could set the entirety of Europe aflame. These shots, fired in an obscure part of the former Ottoman Empire, would set Europe ablaze for four bloody and terrible years. Welcome to ancient Theresa. My name is Joseph Parkinson. In this final episode of our series on the Second German Reich, we will cover how Germany went to war in 1914, Germany's experience of war, the impact on German economy on the German psyche, and the collapse of the Hohenzollern royal family and the Second German Reich.

Episodes of the Ancient to Recent podcast come out every Friday, 8:00 Central European time. Kaiser Wilhelm the Second was on his Royal Yacht. He was hosting a tea party for the officers and families of his attache. At that moment, in rushed A adjutant who pressed into his hands a telegram informing him of the terrible events that had just unfolded in Sarajevo. He was shocked. He was stunned into silence. But his silence soon turned to determination.

He believed that Austria had to settle the score with Serbia. You can't just go around clipping senior members of the royal dynasties of Europe. And he believed that if push came to shove that Germany may need to throw it's immense industrial and military might into the fray to help their closest ally, the Austro Hungarian Empire. However, Wilhelm was far from keen on there being a war, but he didn't really think that the events that were unfolding in the Balkans were particularly likely to spark a general European war. He had asked his Prussian Minister of War if the German army was ready, to which he was told yes, and he believed that the reason that he had given Austria such firm determination was to show to France and Russia, who may seek to exploit the situation, that conflict with Austria would mean a conflict with Germany and therefore to deter a military intervention.

However, he was convinced that war wasn't about to break out and he in fact actually went on holiday on his yacht to Norway. Many in the German high command, however, had become increasingly alarmed in recent years at the strategic imbalance in Europe. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Russia had experienced breakneck economic growth, but this economic growth had led to a destabilisation of the fragile social order within Russian society. In 1905, Russia is then humiliated by the Japanese. The Japanese defeat the Russian army on land and crush the Russian Navy at the Battle of Sushima, checking the expansion of the Russian Empire, which previously had been directed towards Central Asia and Far East. This had caused an uprising in Russia that had almost toppled the regime of Nicholas the Second. The Czar had been able, through a combination of concessions that he didn't mean and brutal repression, keep a lid on revolutionary change within Russia for a brief period. However, Nicholas the Second knew that the legitimacy of his regime was increasingly being questioned and he needed some way to relieve the pressure that was building within Russian society.

What he needed was a win. The Russian army could March off, win some glorious victory over some dastardly foreigners in the name of saving some benighted, oppressed but incredibly grateful people, and everyone would then hail the Tsar as the benevolent father. And maybe you'll just forget about all these desires for more rights to vote and having food and shoes for their children and all of this annoying stuff that these socialist left wingers keep bringing up.

In the wake of the shambolic performance of the Russian army in the Russell Japanese War of 19 O 5, Russia now engaged in a massive program of military reorganization and modernization. So now Germany is faced with a Russia that has always had huge advantages in terms of land mass and population, but is increasingly reckless in it's foreign policy, desperately seeking a foreign policy when in the form of a war. This began to cause tremendous concern amongst the German high command who started to feel that conflict with Russia was becoming inevitable.

The Chief of Staff of the German Army was a man called Helmut von Muhlke Junior. He was the nephew of Helmut von Mulker senior, who had been the Chief of General Staff of the Combined German armies in 1870 during the Franco Prussian War. Mulker had warned Wilhelm that war with Russia was inevitable, but if Germany waited for Russia to complete it's rearmament and it's modernisation, then faced with an already numerically superior Russian army and also almost certain support for Russia on the Western Front from France, Germany, if Germany fought alone, would be doomed. So Germany needed to have allies to The German high command believed that war with Russia and war with France was inevitable and had to be conducted before the Russians had completed their modernisation and rearmament. It was now or never.

The German high command had been planning for war for years. They had developed something called the Schlieffen Plan. The Schlieffen Plan states that Germany must strike W against France, crush the French army quickly and then against what they assume will be the more powerful army. The Russian army swing eastwards to join with the Austrians to defeat the Russians. This was based on the assumption that Russia would be slow in mobilising, so this would buy them a brief moment to defeat France before taking on Russia.

When Russia starts making bellicose noises in support of Serbia, Germany cannot allow Austria either to be humiliated by Serbia or alternately to fight alone against Russia, which would inevitably mean that Russia would be able to defeat Austria. And then when the war comes, the inevitable conflict comes against Russia and France. Germany is on it's own and therefore doomed. If Austria is going in against Serbia, then Germany has to go in to Czech Russia. Representatives from the Austrian government approach Kaiser Wilhelm and he gives them what historians refer to as the famous blank cheque.

Whatever Austria does, we will support you. But there's an editorial note I would like to add here as well. Did Germany give Austria a blank cheque? Yes, it did. Should the Germans have done that? No, they shouldn't have. But there was another blank cheque, wasn't there? There was a blank cheque given by Russia to Serbia. Russia was backing up the Serbs, even though the Serbs had just murdered Franz Ferdinand. Yes, Austria was looking for a fight with Serbia. Yes, Austria's demands of Serbia were unreasonable. But Russia didn't actually have to get involved. But they did it because of internal problems and internal problems again and again and again. People trying to solve their domestic issues by hoping to fight a war which would just distract everyone for long enough are a constant theme of the decisions of many of the countries that participate in the First World War to go to war.

Austria makes its demands of Serbia that they consciously construct in such a way as to make it impossible for the Serbs to accept. They even deliver the ultimatum late on a Friday to make sure that the ultimatum isn't even read till the Monday morning, thus running the time down. Once the ultimatum is read and understood by the Serbs, they see straight away that they cannot accept this because it essentially would relegate Serbia to being little more than a Austrian vassal state. Though Austria then declares war on Serbia on the 30th of July, Russia mobilises on the 1st of August, Germany declares war on the third, they declare war on France. This then leads Britain to declare war on Germany on the 4th of August and the Great War has now begun. The German Chancellor out the outbreak of the First World War was a man called Batman Holdwick. He went to the Reichstag, the German parliament, to convince them to vote through war credits to finance Germany's war effort. And in order to do this, he, the Kaiser, the German high command, promoted A myth that Germany was fighting a defensive war. And it is this myth that Germany is fighting a war that is being thrust upon it, that Germany has no choice but to go to war in 1914 that is widely believed in Germany and would be widely believed in Germany for decades after. That really holds together and unifies the different parts of German society.

Germany had been incredibly deeply divided along regional, religious and class lines ever since it's creation, but in the summer of 1940 there is a genuine sense of defiant patriotism. It's not, as was promoted for so long, and it's now long debunked, the spirit of 1914, where everyone joyously threw up their hats in the air with delight that they were finally going to March off to war. They had some idea that war men blurred and death and sacrifice, and there were peace protests in Berlin and Munich.

But at the same time, there was in the German psyche a sense that 1914 was reminiscent of the Franco Prussian War. It was reminiscent of 1870, where Bismarck had contrived to create a scenario where France would declare war on Germany and therefore the German people would unify and come together and then win this glorious victory against the old foe. There was also a sense among some people in the political class of relief. Germany in the pre war years, far from being a nation in peace and harmony with itself as it serenely grew to being Europe's behemoth, instead had been a deeply divided society and quite a economically unstable society.

There had been a economic shock in 1913. There was deep frustration both amongst working class people and also amongst the ruling class who couldn't understand the working class. Maybe the unity that came with fighting a dastardly foreign foe would help heal some of those rifts, especially if you look at it from the perspective of the SPD, the German Left party. They saw themselves fighting a war against not just a hated old French enemy, but the bogeyman state of the late 19th, early 20th century, which was autocratic Czarist Russia. For trade unionists and socialists and progressives, the Russian Empire was.

The hate figure of the late 19th and early 20th century. And so this idea that we're not just defending Germany, but we're also striking a blow against this hated autocratic regime allowed many sections of society that maybe wouldn't have been won over by bellicose nationalistic flag waving to get on board with the idea of rallying behind the Kaiser and the German military to fight a war that could be presented, if you looked at it from a certain perspective, as both defensive and progressive. The German high commands set out to enact their much wanted plan in the event of war, the Schlieffen Plan. Schlieffen himself had believed that Germany only had three weeks to defeat France and the German high command believed it would take up to 28 days for the Russians to be able to complete mobilisation.

So they would probably just about have time to do it if it all worked out brilliantly. However, in the event, Russia mobilized much more quickly than the German high command expected. The Germans also knew that punching straight through the border defences with France was not really an option. This was a heavily fortified area. Time was of the essence, speed was the important factor and so this led to the decision by the German High command to swing through Belgium in 1901.

The German High command had carried out war games where they had simulated what swinging through Belgium would look like, what resources they would need, what conditions would be required for it to be a success and they came to the conclusion that they would need 48 1/2 Army Corps. Plus they would need Belgium to offer no serious resistance and they would need Britain to stay out of the conflict. There were two crucial parts of the Schlieffen Plan.

There was the German army positioned along the Franco German border, and then there was a second, much larger German army that would be swinging through Belgium. And the idea was to kind of repeat what had been done in 1870 in the Franco Prussian War. The German army along the border was to retreat into Germany in the face of the advancing French army, which would extend the French supply lines, allow the German army in the north to swing through Belgium, encircle the French army and to crush it. Then the Germans would be free to simply March into Paris whenever they wanted.

However, in the lead up to the First World War, there had been slight changes made by Moltke to the Schlieffen Plan whereby the German army that was positioned along the border was actually strengthened and the German army swinging N was weakened in the event of the conflict. That meant that instead of the German army retreating into Germany and bringing the French with them, they just stayed still, and so therefore the French didn't end up being overextended and didn't end up being exposed. Plus, when the German army enters Belgium, instead of the 48 1/2 Army Corps that they require, they only have 34. They also encounter very stiff resistance from the Belgians and they encounter the British Expeditionary Force. Now Britain had fought in the very end of the 19th and early 20th century, a terrible conflict in South Africa called the Boer War.

And the British, who had marched off thinking that they were going to easily defeat the Boers, had had one hell of a surprise. And so this has led to a huge process of rearmament and retraining and modernisation and rationalisation of the British Army to Britain, which never had a huge armed forces, had instead created something called the British Extraditionary Force. A small army of about 100,000 troops but incredibly highly trained, well disciplined and well led. And one of the core skills the British soldiers had to master before completing their training was rapid accurate rifle fire. The British had a rifle called the Lee Enfield Rifle, which a British soldier had to be able to fire up to 30 aimed shots in a minute.

This plus the advent of the Vickers machine gun meant that when the German largely conscript army encountered the British Army at the Battle of the Mons, the British were able to inflict massive casualties upon the Germans. Even though the Germans heavily outnumbered them, the German army through sheer weight of numbers was still able to push the British and the Belgians back. However, a combination of factors began to cause the Germans immense problems. The German army had rapidly expanded at the beginning of the First World War, with huge numbers of civilian conscripts flooding into the ranks.

Not professional soldiers, not soldiers who had been subject to military discipline and training for years. The combination of the German high command now having to wield this ginormous armed forces that wasn't used to military discipline, plus the shock of taking immense casualties immediately led to the beginning of breakdowns in discipline for German troops very early on. And this led to some very ugly scenes. One being the example of the town of Lloyd and in Belgium where German troops rampaged, killing hundreds of Belgian civilians.

This fed into a British propaganda campaign that presented the German Hun as a barbarous monster that sought to defile poor, weak Belgium and the French maiden. A lot of this is really just British World War propaganda. In fact. Actually the German army didn't particularly behave badly. There were indeed incidents where German troops did disgrace themselves, but broadly speaking the German army was quite well behaved towards civilians in the First World War. And in fact, British newspapers ended up using pictures of Russian atrocities, specifically Russian atrocities carried out in the early 20th century against Jewish communities and passing them off in the British press as examples of the barbarous German Hun and his diabolical behaviour towards the defenceless virgin that was Belgium. And incidentally, with regard to Belgium being some innocent bystander, this was only a few years after Belgian had carried out the Holocaust of the Belgian Congo where 10 million people had been killed.

So I'm not sure Belgium gets to play the victim card. The British and the Belgians, along with the French, continue to be pushed back simply under the weight of the sheer enormity and the momentum of the juggernaut of the German armed forces. However, at the River Man, the German army is finally checked in it's advance, agonisingly short of being able to reach Paris. From this point on, the war on the Western Front becomes static. It becomes the trench warfare that exists in our popular imagination.

And the Schlieffen Plan had failed on the Eastern Front. Russian mobilisation had been much quicker than anyone within the German High command had believed possible. On the 15th of August, only 14 days after Russia and Germany had declared war on each other, the Russian army began advancing. The Germans had committed all of their resources to defeating France as quickly as possible. Of the 8 armies that Germany was able to call upon, seven of them had been hurled W against Belgium, Britain and France, and only one had been left behind to defend Prussia and Berlin.

The the Russians advance into East Prussia with two armies, one in the north with 191,000 troops, one in the South with 200,000 troops. There's only 150,000 German soldiers standing in their way. However, at the Battle of Tannenbaum, the German army meets the Russian army and inflicts a crushing defeat upon it. They capture 45,000 Russian soldiers. It is one of the most comprehensive victories. It's almost like a Napoleonic war style victory by the Germans against the Russians. And it is overseen by two figures who would come to dominate Germany throughout the course of the war, Eric von Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg. The Battle of Tannenbaum, a small German army had faced the odds of the vast hordes of Tsarist Russia and defeated them.

Would play into the mythology of the German army over the next few decades. This idea that the victorious, brave, courageous German military known for it's professionalism, had one, against all the odds, had remained undefeated in the face of unbelievable barbarism, would become a central idea of the romantic nationalism of the German right. And if you accept this idea, therefore blame for ultimate defeat in the war cannot fall on the German army. It has to fall on someone else, and it falls ultimately on the civilian politicians within Germany. This is the very beginning of this idea of the stab in the back, the idea that Journey didn't really lose the First World War.

It wasn't really the army's fault. It was the dastardly, cowardly, socialist left wing Jewish politicians, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera that would be promoted by extremists on the far right and would play such a big role in condemning Germany to the horrors of the 20s, thirties and 40s. On the Western Front. The Schlieffen Plan had failed, the advance on Paris had been checked on the banks of the River Man, but what now began was something called the Race to the Sea.

The Allied and German armies constantly tried to outflank each other all the way to the Channel, believing that the Germans could still possibly cut off the Allies access to support coming over from the Channel from the British and could still complete an envelopment move where they would in circle Paris and force the French to surrender. This doesn't work out. Every time the Germans and the British try and outflank each other they meet in these horrific battles where hundreds of thousands of troops are killed. The Battle of Eprua is fought.

130,000 troops are killed on the German side with no gains. The German high command becomes desperate. Both sides are determined to restore movement to the battlefield and to break out of this grinding trench warfare. The Germans start resorting to previously unused tactics and technologies. You start seeing the first use of mustard gas and other nerve agents deployed against the French army by the Germans. You start seeing Zeppelin raids, these ginormous airships floating over London dropping bombs which were personally approved by the Kaiser.

Britain has placed a blockade on Germany so the Germans resort to U boats submarine warfare where they begin sinking shipping heading to Britain in an effort to impose a counter blockade on the British and starve the British war industry and population of the resources and the will to continue to fight. This, on the 7th of May, leads to the sinking of the ship Lusitania, which was a passenger ship with hundreds of civilians, many of them Americans, being struck by torpedoes, fired by a German U boat and sinking off the coast of Cork in the South of Ireland. These tactics are seen as being underhanded, they're seen as sneaky and despicable, the kind of things that you would expect from the barbaric Hun, as is portrayed in the British press at the Battle of Verdun from February to December 1916. There is mass slaughter of German and French soldiers. The battle of Verdun is designed by the head of the German army, which is a man called Falkenheim. The idea is to create a meat grinder, not necessarily to take the town, but Verdun is a place of particular national spiritual significance in the psyche of the French people. And so by attacking Verdun and forcing the French army to commit ever greater quantities of troops, the idea is that the German army can bleed the French army white. They can create a meat grinder to exhaust the manpower of the French army in defence of Verdun. The problem is that yes, the Germans inflict staggering casualties, nearly 400,000 on the French, but they also suffer 350,000 casualties themselves.

By the time the battle is over, there is nothing left. It's a lunar landscape, a total wasteland for all of these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of soldiers who've been killed and crippled and maimed and wounded and destroyed psychologically beyond ever possible any hope of repair. What has been achieved? Nothing. Nothing has been achieved. The lines have moved hardly a jot. The British launch a counter attack to try and take the pressure off the French Verdun at the Somme and the 1st of July, the first day of the Somme, will forever be remembered as the Black day of the British Army. 50,000 British casualties in 24 hours. By this point the British had transitioned from their small, highly trained, highly professional army to a vast conscript army, and many of those young, inexperienced troops would be killed in the pointless Battle of the Somme. On the Eastern Front, the Russians launched something called the Boroslav Offensive, which is somewhat different. In the West it's a grinding, attritional war of static trenches.

On the east it is a war of movement and the Burslav offensive is aimed at Galithia, the eastern part of the Austro Hungarian Empire. The Russians, they punch through and they destroy the professional Austrian army. From this point onwards, the Kuk, the Austro Hungarian armed forces, are effectively a shadow of themselves and increasingly come under the leadership and become dependent upon the manpower and industrial might of Germany for Austria to continue to fight. After the Boroslav offensive in 1916, the Austrians approached the Germans and asked them to consider the idea of a negotiated peace.

But there's a kind of interminable logic to how the Germans think about the war that will be familiar to anyone who reads about conflicts like Vietnam. The more you sacrifice, the more you have to justify the sacrifice. Therefore, the harder agreeing to peace, to stop the killing when you haven't actually achieved anything that justifies the killing in the 1st place, becomes the more people die, the more you have to keep fighting.

Therefore the more people die, therefore the more you have to keep fighting. And by 1916, having sacrificed already millions of young men for nothing. So the question then becomes, well, what was that all about? Then why did we do all this in the first place? In 1916, the German Navy, One of the major factors that had contributed to the rising tensions in Europe in the lead up to the First World War had of course been the expansion of the German Navy. It sails out to confront the British at the Battle of Jutland.

It is inconclusive. The Germans inflict slightly more casualties on the British, but ultimately the battle neither leads to the destruction of the German High Sea Fleet nor does it break the blockade, therefore ending in a stalemate. The German Navy from that point on sails back to it's principal naval base in Kiel, and the German surface fleet is essentially not seen or heard of for the rest of the war until November 1918. From the very beginning of the war the British had imposed A blockade upon the Germans and this caused severe hunger and shortages for civilian.

Unable to challenge the British Navy in conventional warfare, the Germans increasingly relied upon U boats submarines to sink merchant shipping. This had led to a number of incidents, one the previous mentioned Lusitania, where American ships were sunk and where Americans lost their lives. At the beginning of the First World War, America had been strictly neutral. However, the sinking of American shipping had begun the process of changing American public perception towards Germany.

That and a vigorous campaign of largely lies on behalf of the British media to paint the Germans as barbarous monsters. The Germans, however, didn't particularly help themselves. The German ambassador in Mexico was a man called Alfred Zimmerman and the German High Command sent a telegram to Zimmerman instructing him to make an offer to the Mexican government that said that in the event of the United States of America entering the war on the side of Britain, that Germany would then finance an arm Mexico to invade the United States of America in the hope of reconquering Texas and Arizona and New Mexico and California and all the land that Mexico had lost in the Mexican American War of the 1840s.

Now the fact that Mexico at that moment was in the process of fighting it's own civil war seemed not to register with anyone in Berlin. How exactly is Germany going to transport vast amounts of munitions and money to Mexico to help them invade Houston? None of this was ever made clear. This was presented by Alfred Zimmerman to the Mexican government that reacted slightly awkwardly. There was a bit of a shuffling of their feet and they thought, yes, there, please.

Can we never mention that this would ever again? Needless to say, this offer, even though not taken up by the Mexicans, it was intercepted by the British who then presented this to the American government who said, look, Germany is already fighting an aggressive war. Germany is already sinking your shipping and now Germany is conspiring with Mexico to attack you to invade the United States of America. These factors contributed to Woodrow Wilson, the American president, deciding that Germany could not be allowed to win this war and to throw the immense weight of the US economy into the Allied cause.

And to do so, just a moment. 1917, when Germany was really reaching it's point of absolute and utter exhaustion. But there is a glimmer of hope for the Germans. In October 1917 there is a second revolution. There had been a first revolution that brought down the Czar. February 1917. A second revolution breaks out in October or November, depending upon which calendar you're looking at, the Western or the Orthodox calendar, which brings Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power, and they come to power on a very simple platform.

We will make peace and end this war with Germany immediately, at any cost. Straight away the government in Petrograd, or as it is today, Saint Petersburg, which at the time was the capital of the Russian Empire, begin to negotiate peace with the Germans. They string the peace negotiations out for several months before the Germans say you will sign immediately or we are going to go on all out offensive on the Eastern Front.

At which point Leon Trotsky, who is the leader of the Soviet negotiation delegation, agrees on the 3rd of March to sign something called the Breastlitovs Treaty, which hands Germany basically everything they want. Vast swathes of farmland, industrial land, the creation of the Ukraine and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania as effectively German Basel states pushing Russia far back, giving up huge amounts of its natural resources on the eastern front.

The Germans won, and they won hands down. This gives the German high command a window of opportunity. The Russians have gone, the Americans have declared war. But in 1917, the United States of America basically doesn't have an army. The USA in 1917 hadn't fought a major war since the end of the American Civil War, which was in 1865 S the US standing army at the time is smaller than the standing Army of Portugal. It's going to take the United States of America several months to train and equip Significant numbers of troops, enough to be deployed then on the Western Front and make a difference. So the Germans have freed up now vast numbers of battle hardened, heavily armed, highly experienced troops that they can redeploy from the Eastern Front to the Western Front for one final throw of the dice.

Can the Germans knock the British, Imperial and French armies out of the war, take Paris and win the war? In that brief moment before the Americans are able to arrive, the German army is reequipped, retrained new tactics. The days of the mass infantry advance are a thing of the past. German units are broken up into small storm brigades instead of human waves running towards machine gunfire as had happened in 1914 and 15 and 16. Small units of German troops would infiltrate the front lines, create chaos, and pave the way for the advancement of the vast numbers of German infantry divisions that would advance behind them.

Tanks, handheld machine guns, hand grenades. A different way of thinking, a different way of fighting was going to be deployed by the German army in one last throw of the dice, one last gamble. The chips are going in. The Germans are betting on black. It is called the Kaiser Schlacht, the Kaiser's Battle, also known as Operation Michael, and it is launched on the 21st of March 1918. Initially, it is met with great success. The Germans Dr. the British, French and Imperial troops back by 60 kilometres, 90,000 allied soldiers are captured. The war of trenches and barbed wire and mud and blood and thousands of dying to take 2 meters is over, and movement is restored to the battlefield of the Western Front. But by 1918, the supply crisis of the German army, the German economy is so acute that the supplies that are required to keep the German troops moving forward are simply not available, and the allies are now able to call upon ever increasing quantities of material brought from the vast arsenal that is the economy of the United States of America. The Allies, along with the now large numbers of American troop who arriving in their 10s of thousands per week by mid 1918, are able to launch a major counter offensive that drives the Germans back when the Germans failed to take Paris on the banks of the River Man 4.

Pointless, meaningless. Years of fighting and killing and dying have been completed. 4 million Germans have died and they're exactly where they were before the offensive on Paris petered out. Hindenburg and Ludendorff finally understands that the game's up. On the 29th September they ask the civilian government in Berlin to begin to negotiate the Armistice that will be signed on the 11th of November 1918, bringing an end to the First World War and the collapse of the German Empire.

The Kaiser had been eager to encourage a sense of Germany having been wronged, having been forced to go down the path of armed conflict against it's wishes by the aggression of it's enemies. The idea that Germany was fighting a defensive war, this was a commonly held belief in Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm was very popular at the beginning of the First World War, and he was loudly and often praised in the press. Long before censorship began to set in across the Reichstag, there was a consensus in favour of supporting the German government's war effort, including being shared by the principal party of the left, the SPD. The SPD had also made a point of stressing that one of Germany's main opponents in this conflict was Cyrus Russia, a living embodiment of everything that progressive, modern, forward thinking Germans hated and opposed. Superstitious, intolerant, backward looking usual. The nightmare of Germany becoming a vassal state of an autocratic regime in the way that Poland had become was something that motivated even people on the political left in Germany to want to fight to defend Germany from the threat of Czarism.

So it was quite easy for the German high command to get the Reichstag to vote the German government war credits to finance the war. And at the same time the German trade union movement also swung behind the war effort and promised that during the duration of the war there would be no strikes. The Reichstag passed something called the Enabling Act. The second Enabling Act would be passed in 1933 with terrible consequences.

But in 1914 they passed an Enabling Act that basically hands all power to the German government to rule by decree without any need to really consult with the Reichstag for the duration of the war. This effectively suspends democracy. From this point onwards, the German government, and therefore the German High command, has control over the police, education, transport, the press. They are allowed to requisition property.

Anything that they believe is necessary for the conduct of the war, they take particular interest in tightly censoring Germany's previously vibrant press. From this point onwards, the population is to be fed a constant diet of upbeat news about victories. How well everything is going, victories, inevitable, etcetera etcetera etcetera is the only information that is to be getting through to the German populace. The problem with this is that this tends to form a information loop whereby people within the high command themselves begin to believe this, including the Kaiser.

Now the Kaiser stepped back from the day-to-day running of the war. He left this up to Molka, who was then replaced by Fulkenheim before eventually Hindenburg and Ludendorff end up running the war and by running the war the entire German state. From 1916 onwards, Hindenburg and Lundendorf impose what we would call today a command economy upon the German people. There are central targets that are set by the German high command.

Everything is geared towards providing the armed forces with the ability to continue to fight. All other concerns, including the suffering of the civilians, are entirely secondary to the needs for raw material and manpower of the German army. But no matter how much censorship the German military is able to impose upon the press, they cannot cover up the bread queues, the empty stomachs, the desperate letters home, the ever increasing butchers build, the constant flow of German soldiers coming back from the frontline, crippled, maimed, wounded or in coffins. In 1916 alone Germany suffers 1,000,000 casualties and the stress on the home front becomes unbearable. The first to crack are the industrial workers. The winter of 19/16/1917 is particularly harsh and hunger, a lack of fuel.

The intense cold leads to desperate workers engaging in strike action for the first time. One of the reasons that Hindenburg had actually signed off on the unrestricted U boat warfare was in the hope of actually breaking the blockade and therefore allowing increased quantities of food to come through. That could therefore go not just to the army but the people, and then deal with some of the pressure that was building internally. Strikes became more frequent, you started to see the calls for peace.

Starvation started to really set in. The first discussions about a negotiated settlement begin in the Reichstag. As a result of this, Batman Holwig, the Chancellor of Germany, is forced out by Hindenburg and Ludendorff in 1917. The Reichstag is becoming increasingly divided. More and more people are starting to believe that peace is essential and victory unattainable, but there's no agreement on what that peace should look like.

The SPD, the principal party of the left, is divided between radical elements and more Social Democratic elements. It ends up splitting and there are two factions, the SPD and the independent SPD that in the 1920s would go on to form the German Communist Party. We start to see also the growth of radicalism on the German right. The military supports the creation of something called the Fatherland Party, an extreme nationalist political party.

They too encourage some sort of peace settlement. However, for them, peace can only be brought about through victory. It's only when they have won something, anything that can then be said to justify the immense sacrifice. The only thing that cannot be entertained by the German nationalist right and by the German armed forces is the idea of stopping the war simply for the point of ending the killing, because the war is pointless.

That is unthinkable. That is an unacceptable idea for the German high command. But the war is now done, something that none of the divisions within German society in the pre war years had ever been able to do. It is actually brought really extreme parties of the left and the right into existence in a way that hadn't really been the case beforehand. Support for the Kaiser begins to ebb, and in the end of 1918, the Kaiser appoints Prince Max of Barden in order to bring about meaningful, substantive political reforms, really for the first time, to the political system that Bismarck had introduced with the creation of Germany in 187071. But these reforms are taking place at the tail end of 1918. By this point, Germany is a defeated nation in all but name. The Kaiser and the German monarchy, which is so closely associated with the war and with the military, is seen as being a effectively illegitimate entity.

No amount of reform by the end of 1918 was going to be able to save the monarchy and very aware of what had happened to the Kaiser, was very aware of what had happened to his cousins in the Russian royal family. So he decided to abdicate to prevent any more bloodshed. This war and how Germany had transformed into a dictatorship had injected the poison of extremism. On the left and the right, that would haunt Germany and lead to the cataclysmic disaster in 1933 of the rise of Hitler. It just shows how shallow Germany's democratic culture and institutions were and how fragile the political system that Bismarck had set up that Germany almost immediately became a military dictatorship after the outbreak of the war. Yes, Germany was going through a terrible trauma. The First World War was absolutely awful. But Britain and France also went through the same war with huge losses, and Britain and France at no point in the conflict, became dictatorships.

But Germany did. Germany had planned to finance the war through loans and bonds rather than taxation. It was believed that taxation would fall overwhelmingly on the poor and as such that would increase social divisions. The assumption was that it was OK to basically finance the war on the nation's credit card because Germany was going to win. And as Germany was going to win, any cost for the war wouldn't actually be paid by Germany, it would be paid by whoever Germany defeated.

So it doesn't matter how much money we spend today, because tomorrow whatever we are running up on our credit card will be paid for by someone else's credit card, specifically France, or it will be made-up through annexations. If we are able to defeat the Russians and annex the second-half of Poland, or turn Poland in the Baltic States and Ukraine into German vassal states to be exploited for their natural resources, well, that will make up eventually for our losses. So we can spend anything we want then, because we're not going to be paying for it.

This mentality made it even harder to agree to peace, because if you agree to peace without reparations, you have to pay for the war that you fought, assuming that the people that you defeated were going to be paying for it. There was a lot of tension within the German political class as to how exactly the war was going to be financed. The German government had AI. Suppose you would describe it as a sort of gimmick that they could employ in.

When I was reading about this, I kept being reminded of Pulp Fiction. The briefcase that they opened and the light that shines in anyone's face and they look at it and say how stunned they are. They kind of had something like that, that they could just deploy whenever they wanted. Whenever someone asked 2 difficult questions about how they were going to finance the war, the Germans had a war chest. A literal war chest.

They had hundreds of boxes of gold coins that were the reparations that France had paid after the Franco Prussian war. They literally had a pile of gold in a castle in cases that they could simply point to and say that's how we're going to pay for everything. But there was 1 slight problem. It really didn't actually bear any relation to what a modern industrial war would cost. Industrial war between multiple industrialized societies, all of which are fighting to the death.

Germany wasn't fighting an 18th century war. This wasn't the seven years war where you out manoeuvre each other a little bit, maybe have a little bit of a skirmish, agree to exchange parts of Belgium and Italy, and then you will have a ball at the end of it. This was a fight to the death. This was Total War. This was every single resource that you had available thrown into the conflict, into the fray. So a few boxes of gold pennies weren't actually going to do the business.

The entire war chest that Germany had, though, I'm sure it was very impressive to look at when you're in the room with it, was 120 million marks. That sounds like a lot of money, doesn't it? The cost of one day of fighting the First World War for the German army was 100 million marks. So the entire war chest, the rainy day fund that the German high command had put aside to finance fighting a war, was equivalent to less than 1 1/2 days of the cost of fighting the actual war.

The sum total that Germany would end up spending was 160 billion marks, billion with a bee. So a few boxes of pennies I'm sure wasn't going to cut it. The way that the Germans tried to get around this was to essentially print money. Printing money that had no connection to the actual hard currency reserves and gold supplies the German stake actually had was only going to lead to 1 outcome, which is inflation. In 1913 a dollar was worth 4.2 marks. By 1920 it was worth 32.9 marks.

So again, you have a German high command that believes it has to fight, that this is an existential war for them. The more they fight, the more people die, the more they need to win something tangible. And the more they fight, the more money they spend, the more they need someone else to recoup that money, the more they have to keep fighting until they achieve the thing that is tangible. That both can serve as justification for the sacrifice and can actually pay the bills. This is a interminable, self defeating logic that goes round and round like a hamster's wheel. It traps them in the idea that we have to keep fighting because we've fought so much and we've run up such big bills, so we have to keep fighting because we've fought so much and on and on.

The hamster wheel goes to make Germany's economic predicament even more disastrous than the fact that Germany basically had no idea how it was going to finance the war. Was the British blockade in 1914, half of the raw materials that German industry required were imported from abroad day one Britain, the largest, most powerful Navy in the world, places a blockade on Germany, immediately cutting Germany off from any supplies it gets from overseas.

Originally, there had been a lot of outrage in many neutral countries over the blockade directed towards Britain because this was seen as something that was targeting German civilians so see as a unfair way of fighting, and the US had very publicly demonstrated its anger at the British for engaging in what it considered to be ungentlemanly unsporting tactics. However, that outrage very soon dissipated when Germany boats started sinking American ships with the blockade that severed Germany's access to overseas markets that had the raw materials that German industry required. This LED immediately to shortages. Food, fuel, iron, everything.

The German high command dealt with this by transitioning to a command economy and moving away from any economic activity being carried out without the sanction of the German military. This placed huge powers in the hands of the German armed forces to control the lives of civilians. The German army was able to requisition anything and anyone if they believed that they were required for fighting the war. So everything from roof tiles, church bells, wedding rings, door knobs, food, even people could simply be requisitioned, drafted into the war effort, and no one had any legal recourse against this. Increasingly, the German high command ignored the needs of the civilians.

People were starting to freeze in their homes because cold was being taken, used for the army, used for the factory. People were beginning to starve because the food was taken to feed the army. People couldn't travel, fuel was taken, horses were taken, everything was taken. This endlessly increased the suffering and misery of a impoverished, traumatized, starving and desperate population. When Romania and Austria collapse in 1918, it means that Germany is now severed from its last serious supply of oil. Germany had stockpiles that could maybe have kept the German army to some degree at the front for a few months, but even then Germany was facing mass starvation at home. By 1918, the civilian population had long passed the point of breaking even.

If they did keep fighting, it's a matter of time before the last raw materials that Germany needs to continue at the front are exhausted. The reality is that as much as the First World War was a military conflict, it was an economic conflict. That economic conflict was decided the day Britain imposed a blockade on Germany. From that point, it is a matter of time. There is simply no way that Germany can feed and supply its army and its people. The suffering of the German people in the First World War is immense.

Of all German men aged in 1922 in 19, fourteen, 35% of them by 1918 are dead. 2,000,000 Men die fighting in the trenches of the First World War. 2,000,000 Husbands, brothers, sons, uncles, friends. 2 million homes without a father. 2 million empty chairs at family gatherings. 2,000,000 Pictures faded on a mantelpiece of the son of a brother. The hole that left in the lives of millions of Germans, parents and children and wives and siblings, is impossible to contemplate that millions of people, 10s of millions of people, would have to bear the loss of a loved one, the loss of a child for the rest of their lives.

The psychological and emotional impact that that would have on an entire society is impossible to even think about. The sadness that those people carried with them for the rest of their lives. And this is felt all the more keenly by the fact that Germany would go on to lose. In Britain and France and America, the war would be remembered as a fight for democracy. Those who died would be commemorated in ceremonies and monuments as heroes Who gloriously gave their lives that we may live. But there was none of that in post war Germany. These people had given their lives instead, at best in a pointless war, at worst in a war that many people in the SPD on the more radical side of the left believed had been fought for imperialistic and nationalist illegitimate reasons.

That the soldiers who went off and fought were fools and rubes who had given in to the stupid propaganda that they had been force fed since they were children. The Social Democratic government didn't go to great lengths to create a mythology of honourable sacrifice made. There were also 4.2 million injured Germans. Many of them came home utterly broken and shattered, many with terrible facial disfigurements. Very early in the days of plastic surgery. There was little that could be done for these men. They were provided with tin masks, crude skin grafts and there was also the fate of those who suffered no physical injuries.

But were psychologically utterly destroyed at a time when we didn't understand anything about the trauma that people went through. We knew nothing about PTSD and those people suffered in silence. The suffering of the German people was made all the worse by the outbreak in 1918 of the Spanish flu. 50,000 people in Berlin alone would die. 350,000 across Germany. All of this added to a great well of sadness, bitterness, anger and resentment that would envelope German society for years to come. On the 9th of November, 2:00 PM, Wilhelm is informed that Prince Max of Barden has announced his abdication. Wilhelm is furious and he wants to travel to Berlin to confront Barden, but he is told that this is impossible. Across Germany, riots, protests, revolution is breaking out and is feared that if the Kaiser, who is so heavily associated with the impending defeat and the disaster of war, should attempt to travel to Berlin that he might meet the same fate that his cousin in the Russian royal family did. So the 10th of November, Kaiser Wilhelm, the third and last monarch of Germany, crosses the border into the Netherlands. He's granted asylum by his relatives in the Dutch royal family, and on the 28th he abdicates. He lives a quiet private life at his country estate, spending most of his time with his new obsession, which is woodcutting until March 1941 where he collapse and on the 4th of June 1941 at the age of 82, he dies.

Could the monarchy have been saved? One of the major issues that afflicts Germany in the interwar period is that the Republic itself is viewed as fundamentally illegitimate by the German right. It's that the Weimar Republic, when it is born, it is born in defeat. So the Weimar Republic really has no wellspring of credit to draw upon to give it any sense of legitimacy. There are no good times to look back on after the war. In the awful period of the 20s, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, political instability, people very, very quickly develop a nostalgic rose tinted image of the Second German Reich, of the days of Bismarck and Caprivi and Wilhelm.

For the extreme left, the communists. The Weimar Republic is, of course, completely legitimate because it's a capitalist state for the German right. The Weimar Republic is illegitimate because it's born out of accepting the Treaty of Versailles. And so therefore, one of the problems that Germany really has is that the Weimar Republic only really has support from one political party, which is the SPD. There's no one to act as a unifying force in Germany.

There's no one that Weimar Republic can call upon. There's no institution that everyone in Germany can identify with to some degree or other that can bring everyone together to make people work for the greater good. This is something that Clement Attlee, who is Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1945 to 1951, commented on, that the loss of the German monarchy heightened social divisions. However much Wilhelm was associated undeniably with the defeat of Germany in 1918, once he's gone, once the monarchy's gone, it becomes harder to make people work together.

You get a situation whereby no one views the Weimar Republic as a legitimate state, but it was almost certainly impossible for Wilhelm himself to have stayed in power and the damage that he did was largely in 19/17/18 when as the German people experienced tremendous hardship, he shut himself away. He was seen as a symbol of the aggressive Germany of the pre war years that had thrown Europe into the hell of warfare. And the Allies made it very clear that Germany's system of government needed to change. The Kaiser was one of those changes that needed to be made. Prince Barden attempted a process of political reform. From now on the Chancellor would be responsible to the Reichstag, not to the Kaiser.

But this wasn't enough to offset the outbreak of serious social unrest. The. The German Navy that had only actually fought one major battle in the First World War, the Battle of Jutland, had spent the rest of the war in port. The officers of the German Navy, who had a very keen sense of honour, felt that they'd had somewhat missed out on the war. They haven't done their part. So they decided on the 29th of October 1918 that they were going to commit suicide by battle.

They were going to take the German battle fleet and sailor out to meet the British fleet and they were going to go down fighting. The only problem is that though this sounds like a wonderful romantic idea to the German sailors when this idea was pitched to them. So lads, here's the idea. I know that the war is just about to end and you're just about to be able to go home and see your friends and family and loved ones and you have survived. But we've decided instead to commit suicide for you. Yeah, that one didn't go down.

Very popular with the German Navy. So the sailors basically revolted as we are not all going to die for your sense of honour. The revolt very quickly spread to the mainland. This combined with the shortages, the hunger, the desperation, the tiredness swept through Germany. You started seeing left wing uprises in Berlin and in Munich. But the German government under Prince Barton, he understood that these revolutions were really more to do with starvation and exhaustion than they were to do with a radical concept of socialism.

So he, along with the leader of the SPD, Friedrich Ebert, they announced the proclamation of the German Republic and they called in the returning German army as it came back from the front, alongside militias called the Free Core to crush the uprisings. One of those uprisings was led by Karlie Britt and Rosa Luxembourg of the Spartacus League, who attempted to bring about a socialist revolution. Their efforts were put down by the Free Core, and Liebnikt and Luxembourg were taken by the Free Core and were murdered.

This was another one of the seeds that would sow deep bitterness into the story of Weimar Republican Germany, because it's an SPD government that call in the extreme right to kill the communists and to crush the revolution. When the rise of Hitler comes, the rise of the Nazi Party comes in the late 20s early 30's. The memory of how the SPD had betrayed the far left and prevented A genuine socialist revolution would make it almost impossible for the communists and the socialists to work together.

The treaty that ended the First World War was signed at the Palace of Versailles, the very same place the 48 years before the victorious German army had proclaimed a united German state. The treaty was harsh, it involved vast reparations, the loss of land. Germany would be shown of its colonies, it's army would be reduced in size, it's Navy would cease to exist, and most humiliatingly, Germany would have to admit to guilt for causing the war. When again, Germans thought that they were fighting a defensive war, that this is a war that was forced upon them, and for them to have had to admit that they were the aggressors, that they were the bad guys, was an incredibly bitter pill. Throughout the entire period of the Second German Reich, from 1870 to 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War, the key issue was how to turn Catholics and Protestants, workers and aristocrats, conservatives and socialists, Rhinelanders and Vertenberger's and Bavarians and Prussians into Germans.

How could this be done? How could Germany deal with its internal tensions? And yet, amazingly, in the cataclysmic moment of the defeat of Germany in the bloodiest, most brutal and most futile war that has ever occurred in human history, Germany doesn't collapse. Germany's internal divisions have been the defining issue for two generations, and yet Germany doesn't fall apart, despite the fact that the French had actually wanted to partition Germany into three countries and actively encouraged the breakup of Germany, but it didn't work out.

Why is that? How come Germany endured? Well, the vast majority of the population of Germany by 1918 had been born post 1871, so most Germans only really knew the existence of Germany. Education, securisation and conscription had all played a role in creating a sense of being German. As well as this, the addition of colonies that brought with it coffee and chocolate and new flavours and new tastes had created a national cuisine shared in for the first time ever by all German people to 1° or another. And there was another factor that created this sense of being a German.

And it was the exact same suffering that was brought about by the First World War. Millions and millions had shared in the experience of Epra, Paschendale, Tannenberg, Verdun, the Mons, the Somme, the mud and Death, the screams, the terrors, the hunger, the gas, the barbed wire, the sacrifice. And this sacrifice they had all experienced as Germans. And so the irony is the horror of the war and the bitterness of defeat actually helped Germany overcome the big problem that had plagued Germany for 48 years, how to make Bavarians and Prussians and Saxons into Germans.

My name is Joseph Parkinson, this has been the 4th episode of the Ancient to Recent series on the Second German Reich. Episodes of the Ancient to Recent podcast are out 8:00 Central European time every Friday. You can listen on Apple Podcast, Spotify or YouTube.